knows what."

"Nevertheless the Governor keeps a fair table," said Chichikov.

"Yes, but do you know what all the stuff is MADE OF?" retorted
Sobakevitch. "If you DID know you would never touch it."

"Of course I am not in a position to say how it is prepared, but at
least the pork cutlets and the boiled fish seemed excellent."

"Ah, it might have been thought so; yet I know the way in which such
things are bought in the market-place. They are bought by some rascal of
a cook whom a Frenchman has taught how to skin a tomcat and then serve
it up as hare."

"Ugh! What horrible things you say!" put in Madame.

"Well, my dear, that is how things are done, and it is no fault of mine
that it is so. Moreover, everything that is left over--everything that
WE (pardon me for mentioning it) cast into the slop-pail--is used by
such folk for making soup."

"Always at table you begin talking like this!" objected his helpmeet.

"And why not?" said Sobakevitch. "I tell you straight that I would not
eat such nastiness, even had I made it myself. Sugar a frog as much
as you like, but never shall it pass MY lips. Nor would I swallow an
oyster, for I know only too well what an oyster may resemble. But
have some mutton, friend Chichikov. It is shoulder of mutton, and
very different stuff from the mutton which they cook in noble
kitchens--mutton which has been kicking about the market-place four days
or more. All that sort of cookery has been invented by French and German
doctors, and I should like to hang them for having done so. They go and
prescribe diets and a hunger cure as though what suits their flaccid
German systems will agree with a Russian stomach! Such devices are no
good at all." Sobakevitch shook his head wrathfully. "Fellows like
those are for ever talking of civilisation. As if THAT sort of thing was
civilisation! Phew!" (Perhaps the speaker's concluding exclamation would
have been even stronger had he not been seated at table.) "For myself, I
will have none of it. When I eat pork at a meal, give me the WHOLE pig;
when mutton, the WHOLE sheep; when goose, the WHOLE of the bird. Two
dishes are better than a thousand, provided that one can eat of them as
much as one wants."

And he proceeded to put precept into practice by taking half the
shoulder of mutton on to his plate, and then devouring it down to the
last morsel of gristle and bone.

"My word!" reflected Chichikov. "The fellow has a pretty good holding
capacit